George Orwell

The Politics of Literary Reputation

John Rodden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780765808967
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351517652
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The making of literary reputations is as much a reflection of a writer's surrounding culture and politics as it is of the intrinsic quality and importance of his work. The current stature of George Orwell, commonly recognized as the foremost political journalist and essayist of the century, provides a notable instance of a writer whose legacy has been claimed from a host of contending political interests. The exemplary clarity and force of his style, the rectitude of his political judgment along with his personal integrity have made him, as he famously noted of Dickens, a writer well worth stealing. Thus, the intellectual battles over Orwell's posthumous career point up ambiguities in Orwell's own work as they do in the motives of his would-be heirs. John Rodden's George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation, breaks new ground in bringing Orwell's work into proper focus while providing much original insight into the phenomenon of literary fame.Rodden's intent is to clarify who Orwell was as a writer during his lifetime and who he became after his death. He explores the dichotomies between the novelist and the essayist, the socialist and the anti-communist and the contrast between his day-to-day activities as a journalist and his latter-day elevation to political prophet and secular saint. Rodden's approach is both contextual and textual, analyzing available reception materials on Orwell along with audiences and publications decisive for shaping his reputation. He then offers a detailed historical and biographical interpretation of the reception scene analyzing how and why did individuals and audiences cast Orwell in their own images and how these projected images served their own political needs and aspirations. Examined here are the views of Orwell as quixotic moralist, socialist renegade, anarchist, English patriot, neo-conservative, forerunner of cultural studies, and even media and commercial star. Rodden concludes with a consideration of the meaning of Or

Part One

Anatomy of Reputation

. . . later on [he may] attain a brilliant reputation. And if
it should come only after he is no more, well! ...
He may console himself by thinking of the saints, who are
canonized only after they are dead.
Schopenhauer,
“On Reputation,“ The Art of Literature

No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things
that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that
human beings must avoid.
Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi“

Swaddling ‘St. George’ ushers in the New Year: the countdown to 1984 was finally over.

ONE

Orwell into the Nineties

1. Reputation, Legacy, Historiography

I

“Saints should be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” Orwell said of Gandhi,¹ and probably no one would have been more surprised (and disquieted) than Orwell himself at critics’ posthumous discovery and spontaneous proclamation of his heroic sanctity. He was eulogized majestically by V.S. Pritchett as a “saint” and “the conscience of his generation”;² his beatification as a writer followed in upward revaluations of his work a few months later by leading British and American intellectuals;³ and his canonization in school curricula and in the popular press during the 1950s was conducted by acclamation rather than audit. Periodic impieties from the far Left about a “reactionary petit-bourgeois” Orwell and from psychoanalytic critics about a “sadomasochistic” Orwell merely reinforced the image established among many liberal and conservative intellectuals of a lonely, embattled hero persecuted for having spoken the truth.⁴ Even occasional revelations about Orwell’s shortcomings in private life have only served to reaffirm for his admirers his genuine and fallible humanity.⁵ Many reviewers have depicted him simply as a man among saints. Certainly more than one Orwell-watcher has assumed ‘St. George’ innocent until proven guilty—and skipped trial proceedings altogether.^* Such uncritical hagiography, as will soon become apparent, is only one manifestation of a recurring contrast between images of the man and images of his work.

Still, it would be no exaggeration to say that Orwell merits his own fond benediction to Kipling as “the most popular English writer of our time.”⁷ Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have sold almost 40 million copies in sixty-odd languages, more than any other pair of books by a serious or popular postwar author. One sign and secret of Orwell’s appeal for new generations of readers may lie in the widespread, pleasurable association of his name with our earliest reading experiences, and in the feeling that he speaks directly to every stage of our reading lives. Schoolchildren find Animal Farm a beguiling fantasy, and then learn to delight in the neatness of its allegory. Many of the fable’s mature readers vividly recall having burst through it in a single sitting as youngsters, and sometimes also remember seeing the animated cartoon version, with its happy ending. High school students read Nineteen Eighty-Four, often identifying with rebellious Winston and Julia, and afterwards spotting adult Newspeak and doublethink everywhere. College students in introductory composition classes are reminded by their instructors that “Good prose is like a windowpane” and “What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word,” and then given assignments to model their themes on “Shooting an Elephant,” “Politics and the English Language,” or other of Orwell’s frequently anthologized autobiographical and expository essays. More advanced students of history, politics, and literature not only read these works but also the social documentaries, the literary criticism, and the fiction in order to understand better the nature of poverty, imperialism, war, and totalitarianism; the intellectual and cultural climate of the British 1930s and ’40s; and the interrelations among politics, art, and language. And sometimes just for the pure pleasure of the bracing prose.

Probably no other modern English-language writer’s work has been so woven into the texture of the popular imagination. Teenagers have tuned out and floated off on the waves of rock star David Bowie’s apocalyptic hits, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Big Brother.” Concerned citizens, alarmed about reports of massive CIA-FBI-KGB computer files and worldwide undercover spying operations, have warned that the spectre of Oceania is not just far-fetched science fiction.⁸ The words vaporized, thoughtcrime, and Hate Week suddenly come to life for many of us when televised nightmares like Holocaust enter our living rooms. Indeed, as he once said of Kipling’s rhetorical impact upon the pre-World War I era, Orwell today may also stand as “the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language.”⁹ Bureaucrats traffic in Newspeak, politicians orate in doublespeak, government agents eavesdrop like Thought Police—even “Some are more equal than others” has become a knowing put-down for hypocrisy and a discrimination story headline, making the phrase sometimes sound more native than the Jefferson original. Perhaps not a few youngsters have even wondered, when watching commercials for the nationwide Big Brothers organization for fatherless boys, what “Big Brother Is Watching You” really meant.

So thoroughly have the catchwords and mood of Orwell’s dystopia permeated our collective consciousness that “1984” immediately evokes—or did until the long-awaited arrival of the year—numerous fearful associations. The date is part of Western folklore. Many people don’t know it is a book title; still more have no idea of the name of the book’s author. No matter: the numeral became, as it were, a man-made Friday the 13th. The title of a 1983 Smithsonian Institute panel made the point: “1984 as a Universal Metaphor.”¹⁰ Even people who have never read the book will admit to having paused momentarily in vague anxiety at the mere mention of that numerical swastika of the totalitarian age. Now that we have lived through the year (and recorded it countless times on our letters, checks, and computer terminals), the figure haunts us no longer; instead it may seem to most of us no more than four ordinary numbers, a historical relic, or a hackneyed joke. And yet even our new nonchalance or jadedness toward “1984” testifies in a way to the numeral’s wide currency: surely it is the only number that has ever become a cliché.

In addition to the general impact of Orwell’s last two books, there are the documentaries and essays, with their appeal of Orwell’s accessible, gripping prose style and his apparent rootedness in the culture of ordinary people’s lives. Even Orwell’s casual journalism often gives the impression of freshness, although some of it is now almost a half-century old. Orwell subtitled his first American essay collection “Studies in Popular Culture,”¹¹ and his anthropological pieces on boys’ weekly newspapers, detective stories, and penny postcards in some ways mark him as the grandfather of the field. One is hard-pressed to think of another English writer who has managed to survive and bridge the ever growing chasm between high and mass culture, his work being not only assigned in the universities but widely read by the general public.

Others have paved the trails Orwell blazed. The present-day orientation of academic fields studying issues in communication, sociology, and journalism is partly connected with the history of Orwell’s example and influence. Much of his fiction and journalism carefully explores the subtle interconnections between linguistic and political manipulation, and has spawned English followers like Henry Fairlie and Kenneth Hudson. One critic has maintained that even Orwell’s realistic fiction and documentaries constitute a searching investigation of the failures of language to promote interpersonal intimacy and social harmony.¹² Best-selling anti-jargon vigilantes like Edwin Newman (Strictly Speaking, A Civil Tongue) and William Safire (New Language of Politics, What’s the Good Word?) are directly descended from (though far less serious than) Orwell. Studies in political rhetoric on the government jargon used during the Vietnam War and Watergate Affair have unearthed a mountain of euphemism and doublespeak that makes them seem like research projects documenting our regress toward New-speak. Sociology textbooks have excerpted chapters of Orwell’s novels and documentaries, and Dwight Macdonald called Orwell’s documentary writing “the best sociological reporting I know.”¹³ Orwell’s practices of “living his research,” presenting sociological types like the “tramp-monster” and miner, and offering detailed subjective descriptions of his situations and subjects bear clear affinities with the best-written early fieldwork of the Chicago School of interpretive sociology.¹⁴ More recognizably, Orwell’s energetic prose, his unusual openness about how he may be influencing his own reporting, and his characteristic preference for describing society “from below” by way of lower-class and deviant life mark him as a forerunner of the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Jack Newfield.¹⁵ It is doubtful that any other recent English literary man has served as the subject or springboard for academic studies in such wide-ranging fields as political thought, journalism and media studies, rhetoric and semantics, futurology, popular culture, and even religious studies.¹⁶

II

Not all of these legacies, however, have been as widely acknowledged as they might, nor are those which are claimed necessarily the ones which Orwell actually left. Orwell’s predicament four decades after his death is not unlike what he called Kipling’s “peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years.” “Before one can speak about Kipling,” wrote Orwell in a prophetically self-reflexive moment, “one has to clear away a legend that has been created by . . . sets of people who have not read his works.” Moreover, as he said of Stendhal, the great majority of those who have read his books know him for only two famous ones, a circumstance that has added half-truth to ignorance and turned Orwell legend into chimera.¹⁷

All writers are selectively read and esteemed, of course, according to a plethora of sociohistorical variables. But the point with Orwell is that the popularity of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four has both made his name familiar across a broad spectrum of the international reading public and has helped generate widely variable popular and critical attitudes toward him. “Orwell” and his coinages are recognizable on a worldwide scale. But most people know nothing about Orwell’s life: the man has been eclipsed by the power and notoriety of his masterworks. Among intellectual readers, similar discrepancies prevail. Intellectuals of the Left (Bernard Crick, Irving Howe) and Right (Norman Podhoretz) have judged him the best political writer of the century. Yet some radicals (John Casey) and more literary-minded intellectuals (T.A. Birrell) have regarded him as a (“mere”) journalist.¹⁸

The variations in Orwell’s reputation in the educational community are perhaps most striking. Orwell’s canonization in English curricula was immediate, but it has also been eclectic. Animal Farm is a high school staple. (A former college chairman of the Advanced Placement Program could write in the 1970s, with noticeable chagrin, that Orwell’s beast fable was the only book previously read by every student of the eighty-five in his freshman literature class.¹⁹) Orwell’s essays are likewise standard requirements in introductory university composition classes. Yet these writings are rarely encountered in more advanced courses. Nor, apart from the special attention to Orwell’s oeuvre in 1984, are any of his other works usually taught in the academy. Nor are there any Orwell journals or literary societies.²⁰ (Admittedly, one can hardly imagine anything he would have more disliked.) And yet, except possibly for Lawrence, it is likely that Orwell has exerted deeper influence on young Anglo-American writers than any other English writer of the last half-century. Several postwar British writers more widely taught in university literature courses, such as the so-called Angry Young Men and Movement writers (Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Osborne, Robert Conquest), acknowledge their indebtedness for style and subject matter to Orwell’s early fiction and essays. But he made a first appearance in The Norton Anthology of English Literature only after some of them (fourth edition, 1980).

Statements from those inside and outside the academy on Orwell’s standing as a “canonized” author highlight these oddities in reputation. One coordinator of an American academic conference on Orwell’s work in 1984 told me that, of more than a dozen academic symposia she had organized in the previous three years, no figure or issue had attracted so many international participants as the Orwell symposium. Such testimony stands in apparent opposition to the verdict of several U.S. English professors in a 1983 interview. They agreed that Orwell was a “journalist” and “didactic writer” who “failed to live up to top literary standards,” with Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular “lacking in literary sophistication.”²¹ Readily conceding Orwell’s exclusion from the modern British novel’s “great tradition,” even so ardent an Orwell admirer as Richard Rovere reflected these same assumptions and the prevailing consensus on Orwell’s fiction (“of the second rank”) in his introduction to The Orwell Reader (1956).²² Others have dismissed Orwell’s fiction as being not even third-rate, with his documentaries qualifying him as a lesser Mayhew.²³ I have heard Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four patronized as “high school reading.” (Even though Nineteen Eighty-Four has been one of the books most frequently banned from U.S. secondary schools.²⁴) And since a fable and a dystopia do not fit easily into standard fiction categories, the result is that Orwell the fiction writer is reduced to a “Thirties writer”—his work falling, most inconveniently for reading lists in college literature courses, between the end of the modernist movement and the return to more traditional, realistic fiction in the 1950s.

Some readers, having encountered Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four and an Orwell essay or two as teenagers, vaguely think of “Orwell” and his “old-fashioned plain style” as adolescent fare. Others faintly remember him and his work as something from the dim past. (As one journalist wrote, mockingly, of this feeling in early 1983: “Oh yeah, there’s that book I read in high school. It’s that ‘Big Brother thing’—George . . . what’s his name . . . wrote it.”²⁵) To many Britons and most Americans he is a sort of icon Even after (or because of) the publicizing of Nineteen Eighty-...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction. Appraising Famous Men: Mediating Biography and Society
• Part One. Anatomy of Reputation
• Part Two. The Portrait Gallery
• Conclusion. “Tuppence for the Opinion of Posterity”: The Intellectual Hero in History
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Terms of Repute: A Glossary
• Index